Many people rely on various personal communication devices, such as smart phones, tablet computers, and other computing devices, to contact each other. Such personal communication devices may offer a suite of different communication modalities to contact a recipient including, for example, voice, e-mail, texting, social networking, and/or other communication mechanisms. Due to the increasing use of personal communication devices, users can become bombarded with contacts from friends, family members, work colleagues, and even unknown parties. Such constant contact can occur even during times in which the recipient is busy or unable to accept or respond to the contact such as when the recipient is driving, participating in a meeting, watching a movie, or otherwise participating in an activity that limits the recipient's desire or ability to receive, or respond to, the contact.
Unfortunately, an individual attempting to contact a recipient has very limited ability to determine whether the recipient is able to accept or respond to the contact. While some communication modalities, such as instant messaging, provide some functionality to the potential recipient to indicate their current status (e.g., “I'm away from keyboard,” “I'm busy,” etc.), such functionality is typically limited to manual control by the recipient or automated “dumb” responses (e.g., a busy signal or voicemail) and provide minimal information to the individual attempting to contact the recipient. As such, the individual attempting to contact the recipient generally has limited options in response to an indication that the recipient is unavailable. For example, the individual may simply wait some undetermined amount of time and attempt to contact the recipient again at a later time, at which the recipient may or may not be available to accept/respond to the contact.